Re: espeakf?

[Thomas Ward <slingshooter@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the responce. I still think festival sounds better than eflite, 
and festival works fine if the driver/server is written in C++.
I've had some experience using festival as a synth with gnopernicus and it 
isn't bad, but is still a little slow. However, it has better speech 
quality than eflite.
Looks like I'll try writing my own server at some point, but until I find 
the time to crank one out I'll stick with eflite.


On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Mario Lang wrote:

> Thomas Ward <slingshooter@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > Hello, list.
> > I finally got around to wanting to try espeakf, the festival server for 
> > emacspeak, but I can't seam to check it out of cvs. Everytime I try 
> > sourceforge comes back and tells me I am not authorized to checkout the 
> > files.
> I, as original author of that piece of code, officially
> depreached it some months ago.  I asked sourceforge
> to remove the project, which they didn't really do yet.
> Maybe they just broke the CVS?
> 
> > So I have the following questions.
> >
> > 1. Is espeakf vary good?
> no
> 
> > 2. If it is worth the time to checkout how do I check it out of cvs, or 
> > can someone just send me files?
> no, its not worth the hassle.  Use eflite.
> 
> > 3. If aquestions 1 and 2 are negative do you think it would be better fro 
> > me to write my own emacspeak server for festival?
> If you want to do it, sure :) I gave up, because
> various problems came up:
> 1. Festival is slow, very slow.
> 2. At the time I wrote espeakf, it was not
> really easy to get it to change voices inline.  I looked
> at SABLE, but all that stuff was far too unstable
> to be useful.  I finally just gave up.
> 
> I believe the best way to implement a nicely functional festival
> server would be to use the scheme level of festival.
> i.e., feed it with scheme commands to synth text, and change
> voices.  But I was far too unexperienced with scheme
> back then, and, unfortunately SIOD (the festival scheme interpreter)
> does not support read/write from streams.  So you cant
> write it all in scheme, you have to write a emacspeak
> server in some language, which then calls festival...
> 
> Another approach would have been using the festival C++
> API, but AFAIR, it did not allow anything more than
> just speak_text...
> 
> If you manage to do it, maybe its useful after all, since
> todays machines are a lot faster than 3 years ago.  But I'm still
> not sure if it is worth the effort.
> 
> 

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